Lives in Cricket No 47 - Brian Sellers

140 Keighley, December 2015 Sellers. In his 1978 and 2013 memoirs, Dickie Bird told the story slightly differently of how Sellers gave him the news he would play in the seconds, even after carrying his bat for 181 for the first team. Only in the 2013 book did Bird write of calling out to Sellers, as he turned to walk away: ‘Mr Sellers, I’m so proud to be part of a great Yorkshire squad’: He didn’t know what to say. It was true. I was proud. Still am. But I was a little bit hurt by the chairman’s attitude. And the resentment began to grow … I was playing the best cricket of my life, yet they kept leaving me out of the first XI. Bird ended the 1959 season left out of Yorkshire’s final match against the Rest, though happy after Sellers told him he would ‘definitely’ play the next season. Instead, Ron Burnet was sacked, Vic Wilson became captain, and at the start of the 1960 season, and the southern tour, ‘Sellers read the names out in alphabetical order. I wasn’t in the Bs, perhaps he’d got it in lower down. But he hadn’t. I wasn’t in. I cried.’ Bird went to Leicestershire instead; and his playing career petered out. Bird had reason to resent Sellers, if Sellers said one thing in 1959 and did another in 1960. Yet Sellers could only have picked Bird by leaving someone else out, who then Sellers joined in the social side of an MCC tour – and the mixing of Australian and English journalists, who formed a team. Left to right: Vic Richardson, Clarrie Grimmett, Vivian Jenkins, Arthur Mailey, Bill O’Reilly, George Duckworth, Brian Sellers, Percy Beames, Bill Bowes, Jack Fingleton. Note the two Australians’ wrist-watches in sight.